An Alternative to Microsoft Gains Support in High Places

By STEVE LOHR

Published: September 5, 2002

Governments around the world, afraid that Microsoft has become too powerful in critical software markets, have begun working to ensure an alternative.

More than two dozen countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America, including China and Germany, are now encouraging their government agencies to use "open source" software — developed by communities of programmers who distribute the code without charge and donate their labor to cooperatively debug, modify and otherwise improve the software.

The best known of these projects is Linux, a computer operating system that Microsoft now regards as the leading competitive threat to its lucrative Windows franchise in the market for software that runs computer servers. The foremost corporate champion of Linux is I.B.M. , which is working with many governments on Linux projects.

Against this opposition, Microsoft has found itself in the uncommon position of campaigning for the even-handed competition of "a level playing field." And I.B.M., once the feared monopolist of the era of mainframe computers, is casting itself as a force of liberation from Microsoft, the monopolist of today.

Microsoft worries that some governments may all but require the use of Linux for their powerful servers, which provide data to large networks of computer users. For the most part, the battle does not involve the kind of software that runs on the typical computer user's desk.

To curb such moves, Microsoft is backing an industry group called the Initiative for Software Choice. The group lists 20 members — besides the chip maker Intel , a close ally, most of them small foreign companies or organizations. (Illegally stifling choice, of course, was precisely what the federal courts in the long-running antitrust case ruled that Microsoft did in the market for personal computer software.)

The motivations and actions by foreign governments vary somewhat, but mostly they seem to be trying to ensure competition. That was the stance taken by a delegation of Chinese officials involved in developing their software industry, who visited the United States last month.

In an interview, Jiang Guangzhi, director of a software development center in Shanghai, discussed the progress made in China on various Linux projects and emphasized that the government did not want one company "to manipulate or dominate the Chinese market." With its entry into the World Trade Organization, China is facing increased pressure to crack down on software piracy, adding to the appeal of free software like Linux, Mr. Jiang said.

His delegation had attended the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, and met with I.B.M. executives and its Linux experts at the company's headquarters in Armonk, N.Y.

Yet Mr. Jiang also spoke glowingly of Microsoft's involvement in China. The company set up a research laboratory in Beijing and recently made a commitment to invest $700 million in China over the next three years in education, training and research, and in investments in local companies.

"We appreciate Microsoft's contributions," Mr. Jiang said.

To Chinese Communist officials, it seems, Linux is a useful tool of pragmatic capitalism to pump-prime market competition to China's advantage.

The support of open source software by governments around the world is rising. There are currently 66 government proposals, statements and studies promoting open source software in 25 countries, according to the Initiative for Software Choice. The policy statements and legislative proposals mainly encourage the use of open source software in government procurement, and nearly all of them have cropped up in the last 18 months.

"It's growing, unfortunately, from our perspective," said Mike Wendy, a spokesman for the software initiative, which was founded in May.

The impetus for the international activity was in Europe. A technology advisory group to the European Commission issued a report two years ago that termed open source software "a great opportunity" for the region that could perhaps "change the rules in the information technology industry," wresting the lead in software from the United States and reducing Europe's reliance on imports.

As open source software, especially Linux, has spread, countries in other regions have also come to regard it as both a model of software development and perhaps an engine of economic growth. The government proposals and projects are efforts to position their nations to exploit a promising trend in technology.

Source code is software rendered in a programming language that human programmers can read and understand, before it is compiled down to the digital 1's and 0's that the machine processes. Software companies, like Microsoft, typically guard their source code as a trade secret, and certainly do not allow outsiders to modify or redistribute it.

In the open source model, the source code is freely published for all to see. Then, interested programmers — often all over the world, communicating over the Internet — work on a project to fix, modify and add improvements. These self-selected communities work out their own governing arrangements to determine when changes in the code are approved or rejected.